Jordan Kokot

Over the past twenty-five years, there has been a dramatic increase both in the efforts of private companies to develop invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies and in public discussions of the futures that could be enabled by BCI. These efforts and conversations are often oriented around a set of claims about a) how BCI might provide medical care for people with severe injuries and disabilities, and b) how BCI might enable a “merging” with machines, which would allow humans to transcend biological “limitations,” including death. In this essay, I argue that these efforts depend on a series of problematic claims about human bodies and the nature of “repair.” Drawing from Emanuell Coccia, I argue that “brokenness” is a basic condition of embodied experience and changes to the human body that are coded in terms of a “return” to an idealized state or transcendence smuggle with them pernicious colonial control ideologies. Instead, I offer a notion of “re-pair” that aims to better reflect the fragile vulnerability of our lived bodies. Re-pair casts medical interventions as a bringing together or more closely “pairing” of a human person with their environmental and community reality.

Emerging brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) such as Neuralink have profoundly contributed to the social/political imaginaries of western techno-scientific culture. Though currently focused on medical devices that would enable people with quadriplegia to mentally manipulate computer interfaces, ‘cure’ blindness and ‘solve’ autism and schizophrenia, Neuralink ultimately aims to ‘replace the cell phone’ with BCI as the dominant human–technology interface. Inspired by Eli Clare, this article argues that Neuralink’s emphasis on ‘solving’ bodymind troubles with invasive technology smuggles in a pernicious aesthetic of cure – a political aesthetic which treats disabled human bodies and, by extension, humanity itself as something to be transcended, fixed, normalized and overcome. In contrast, this article proposes a cyborg anaesthetics, a human–technology framework that does not follow logics of bodily transcendence or overcoming. Riffing on Cressida Heyes’s definition of ‘anaesthetics’ as liminal practices that resist neo-liberalism’s emphasis on productivity and progress, and through the artistic practices of Mallory Kay Nelson and Marco Donnarumma, this article explores the anaesthetics of cure evident in cyborg transgressions, i.e. cyborg and cripborg artistic practices that do not strive towards bodily liberation, overcoming or transcendence, but instead take the body as constitutive for human being and as a locus of exploration, experimentation, cooperation and resistance.