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Prototyping Criptical Neural Engineering — Tentatively Cripping Neural Engineering’s Cultural Practices for Cyborg Survival and Flourishing

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Abstract

This Discussion Note calls for attention to the cultural practices of Neural Engineering as part of the life sciences as practices and technologies of manufacturing life. Through focusing on Disability, Ableism, and especially Technoableism within the field, I point out instances of onto-epistemological violence, which influence the likelihood of survival of disabled people individually and as a (cultural and political) group. By drawing on Crip Technoscience, a method assemblage is introduced that allows to address these issues in an intersectional-kyriarchal understanding of interlocking systems of privilege and oppression through generative critique and productive collaborative work. Criptical Neural Engineering is dedicated to disability justice and disability gain. It centers disabled people as epistemic activists and demands response-ability and accountability from non-disabled people, specifically engineers that want to build adaptive technologies with disabled people.

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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. Pos. is the position in the Kindle Version of the book if page numbers are unavailable.

  2. The term “interlocking systems of privilege and oppression” is puzzled together from the work of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, who coined the term “kyriarchy” via Natalie Osborne’s proposal for an integrated framework of intersectionality and kyriarchy that is attentive to “relative privilege” ([3], p. 136f) and Sami Schalk’s use of “social systems of privilege and oppression” to counter critique of how intersectionality is only applied to “multiply marginalized people,” “minority identity positions,” or as “purely additive and expanding” ([4], Pos. 177, 240). Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined intersectionality, thinks that these positions are not additive, but “fundamentally reconstitutive” (Tweet by Kimberlé Crenshaw on 26.06.2020 https://twitter.com/sandylocks/status/1276571389911154688).

  3. I use identity first language (IFL) instead of person first language (PFL) to highlight that disability cannot be separated from the person but encompasses the experiences thoroughly and to reclaim disability as valuable, valid — even “desirable” — way of being in this world, which is often referred to as “Disability Gain” ([5]; [6], p. 4).

  4. For more information visit: https://sites.google.com/view/cybertum/cerebro

  5. I coin this term in reference to Karen Barad’s “intra-action” which radicalises accounts of interactive relationality (Barad 2003). She posits that instead of simply interacting with one another as pre-existing sources of agency, such elements are mutually constituted and reconfigured by entering into a relation [8]. Based upon this understanding, intra-vention takes the mutual constitution and reconfiguration into account but emphasizes the goal of change as “artful contamination” (and at times “mutual betrayal”) in a “hybrid space in which many agents constantly negotiate and influence each other to achieve multiple conflicting goals” ([9], p.371).

  6. Wording taken from the Interdisciplinary Network for Studies Investigating Science and Technology (INSIST e.V., https://insist-network.com/).

  7. Bodymind as a concept states that “because mental and physical processes not only affect each other but also give rise to each other—that is, because they tend to act as one, even though they are conventionally understood as two—it makes more sense to refer to them together, in a single term” ([24], p. 269).

  8. For example, the recent Forbes article that has been published under the title Will Elon Musk’s Neuralink Wipe Disability Off The Face Of The Earth? but has been changed to Could Elon Musk’s Neuralink Be A Game-Changer For People With Disabilities? in the meantime. This however does not affect the general message of the article that is emblematic for the described narrative structure [32].

  9. Original: „[Anderskörperliche sind in dieser Logik] privilegierte Subjekte einer Teleologie der technischen Erweiterung, die als Evolution mit anderen Mitteln gedacht ist “ [2].

  10. Jillian Weise uses the pronoun “cy”. As cy wrote: “I’m a cyborg. Here’s my pronoun: cy. Pronounced: sigh. Here’s how you use that in a sentence: ‘Yeah, I know Jillian. Cy is a poet.’ My pronouns are cy/she/her and that is the order of my preference for my own pronouns. I’m being very serious.” (https://twitter.com/JillianWeise/status/1324865589408636933).

  11. I follow Sara Hendren in using “adaptive technology” over “assistive technology”. She states: “Assistance usually implies linearity. A problem that needs fixing, that seeks a solution. But adaptation is flexible, rhizomatic, multi-directional. It implies a technological design that works in tandem, reciprocally, with the magnificence that is the human body in all its forms. Adaptation implies change over time. Adaptive systems might require the environment to shift, rather than the body” [35].

  12. I do not argue against reproductive technologies and position against conservative efforts to co-opt disability for their agenda to illegalize and punish abortion. The objective must be fully legalized right for abortion without restrictions, comprehensive information on options, and societal support systems that move beyond subsidizing nuclear families ([23], p. 166; [38]). Until then, disability often provides a “minimal right to abortion” but “[m]aking disability do the work of defending abortion may be effective in securing abortion rights in the short term, but it does so by trafficking in discriminatory stereotypes about disability” ([23], p. 166f).

  13. “Supercrip stories rely heavily on the individual/medical model of disability, portraying disability as something to be overcome through hard work and perseverance […]. [T]he same language of overcoming used traditionally in relation to nature conquests also informs much writing about disability: conquest and vanquishing, lording over or being lorded over, climbing the mountain or perishing on its slopes.” ([23], p. 141). As shown by the example, this holds also true for the story Herr is telling.

  14. As the source is a video, the timestamp is given where the quote and/or relevant information is shared.

  15. This is not limited to the engineers who work with this kind of data but can also become relevant for the subjects or users through Neurofeedback [52].

  16. This can be related to Martha Nussbaum’s work on capabilities [66].

  17. The concept of “kyriarchy helps us understand how interlocking systems of oppression ‘criss-cross the subject-positions that the politics of domination offers individuals’” and offers “a way to conceptually grapple with multiple, intersecting, and co-constitutive structures of power and oppression, kyriarchy also accounts for relative privilege “ ([3], p. 136).

  18. The violence is “onto-epistemological,” because it is “not recognizing the validity and equity of other ways of being in the world” and thus not only dismisses but eliminates specific ways of “knowing in being” ([67], p. 829; [69], p. 2; [70], p. 271).

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Acknowledgements

I want to thank Nicholas Berberich for the friendship and his, as well as the Cybertum Project’s, continued collaboration; Prof. Dr. Ruth Müller and Dr. Benjamin Lipp for their guidance and support throughout my master’s thesis which made this Discussion Note possible; and Dr. Melike Şahinol, Prof. Dr. Diego Compagna and Christopher Coenen for the opportunity to publish in this special section and their support throughout the process. Moreover, thanks to Julian Bärlin, lou kordts, Ash Brugger, Mika Murstein, Dr. Danya Glabau, Liz Jackson, Alex Haagaard, Dr. Ashley Shew, Dr. Joshua Earle, Dr. Katta Spiel, Dr. Rua M. Williams, Os Keyes, Dr. Rebecca Monteleone, The Cyborg Jillian Weise, Marina Tsapalina, Logan Kirkland, and Stella Dixon. Furthermore, I want to thank the (online) feminist, activist, academic, and disabled communities I am part of, who enrich my life, enable me to grow continuously, and where I made a lot of meaningful connections.

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 1 Breakdown by search term and journals/databases used to search. The results show findings (highlighted in bold) in total and not the selected to consider for Literature Review, let alone those which are then actually used. Items can occur multiple times across the terms used. Although extensive, this overview is incomplete. Most data were gathered on 23 and 24 July 2020
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Rasper, R. Prototyping Criptical Neural Engineering — Tentatively Cripping Neural Engineering’s Cultural Practices for Cyborg Survival and Flourishing. Nanoethics 16, 35–49 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-021-00405-8

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