Cyborganic Wearables: Sociotechnical Misbehavior and the Evolution of Nonhuman Agency

The twelfth chapter authored by Patricia Flanagan and Raune Frankjær explores how the evolution of wearable technology blurs the boundaries of the body. The writers propose that emergent wearable technologies that augment human perception and sensual capacity may thus come to expand or alter our understanding of what it truly means to be human. Consequently, this techno-genesis of the body, in collaboration with advanced materials and tools, can potentially foster new, interconnected ways of understanding our place within the Neganthropocene.

Building critically on the writings of Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, Bernard Stiegler, Peter-Paul Verbeek, and Bruno Latour, the chapter arrives at a theory of “cyborganic wearables”. Here, the concept of “cyborganic” describes a fictional posthuman entity who is a hybrid of human, nature, and machine. Such a figure, through its relation to cyborganic mutation and creativity, directly calls for a redefinition of humanness itself – a new conceptualization that would lay a more sustainable foundation for the humanity’s self-understanding in the future.