Editorial

Nikki Sullivan and Samantha Murray

Welcome to the first issue of Somatechnics, an international,

transdisciplinary journal committed to critically interrogating the
situated material processes in and through which corporealities are
shaped, experienced and lived in dynamic and complex ways. Studies
of the materialisation of embodied beingor, more precisely,
(un)becomingare important not least because the history of
Western thought is, as poststructuralist theorists have clearly demonstrated, subtended by what Elizabeth Grosz refers to as a profound
somatophobia (1994: 1). From the Ancient Greeks, through
Enlightenment thinkers, to the common-sense fictions that shape life
in the present, the body has been conceived as a natural, biological
entity, the fleshly housing of a soul, self, and/or a mind that is the
bodys superior. Given its status as both prisonor dungeon (sema)
and property, the body (as object,) is constituted as brute matter
which the subject must transcend, transform and/or master.
There have, of course, been various challenges posed to this
model of the body but all too often such attempts reiteratealbeit
inadvertentlya sort of nave materialism in which the body (or at
least, biological processes) is imagined as somehow prior to, or in
excess of, its being-in-the-world. This tendency is particularly apparent
in dominant conceptions of, and debates about, technology as
something that either poses a threat to natural forms of bodily-being,
or, alternately, enables us to move beyond our biological limits: think,
for example, of current debates about cryonics, euthanasia, cloning,
preimplantation genetic diagnosis, postmenopausal reproduction,
biobanking, sex assignment surgeries, immortalism, cosmetic
surgeries.
Somatechnics 1.1 (2011): vvii
DOI: 10.3366/soma.2011.0001
# Edinburgh University Press
www.eupjournals.com/soma

Somatechnics
Poststructuralist theorists have problematised the conception of
technology as simply good or bad, alienating or liberating, arguing
instead that technology is not an object whose essence is innate and
knowable, nor is it simply a tool deployed by an already constituted
subject who is separate from it and wields control over it. Technologies,
as writers as diverse as Donna Haraway, Teresa de Lauretis, Michel
Foucault, Bernard Stiegler, and N. Katherine Hayles have clearly
shown, are heterogeneous in their histories, uses, and effects, and are
thoroughly embedded in situated cultural contexts and processes. As
Anna Munster so eloquently puts it, technologies are always in a
dynamic relation to the matter which gives [them their] substance
and to the other machinesaesthetic, social, economicwhich substantiate [them] as . . . ensemble[s] (1999:121). Further, insofar as
technologies are always already intimately tied to systems of power/
knowledge, they do not stand outside the subject, but rather, are
constitutive of the very categories integral to its specific, situated,
materialisation(s). In short, then, what has begun to emerge in and
through these critiques is the notion of a chiasmatic interdependence of soma and techne: of corporealities as always already
technologised, and technologies as always already enfleshed. On this
model, technologies are never simply machinic; instead the term
encompasses forms of knowledge, regimes of authority, institutions,
administrative measures, laws and propositions, everyday practices of
intervention and contestation, in short, what Foucault (1980a) refers
to as dispositifs.
In late 2005, a group of academics centrally involved in the Body
Modification: Changing Bodies, Changing Selves international conference
(2003), and the Body Modification Mark II international conference
(2005), coined the term somatechnics in an attempt to highlight
the inextricability of soma and techne, of the body (as a culturally
intelligible material construct) and the techniques (dispositifs and
hard technologies) in and through which corporealities are formed
and transformed. This term, derived from the Greek soma (body) and
t !ecnh (craftsmanship), supplants the logic of the and, suggesting
that technes are not something we add or apply to the already
constituted body, but rather, are the dynamic means in and through
which corporealities are crafted, continuously engendered in relation
to others and to a world. As such, the term reflects contemporary
poststructuralist understandings of embodiment as the incarnation or
materialisation of historically and culturally specific discourses and
practices, as fundamentally inter-corporeal, (trans)formative and
ethico-political.

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Editorial
Consequently, somatechnics, at least in the context of this journal,
could be thought of as a form of ethico-political critical practice
(rather than a definable, circumscribable discipline, field of study,
or methodology). More to the point, much of the research to date
that falls under the rubric of somatechnics refers to the operations of
power that are the subject of critical practice, thus foregrounding the
doubleness of techne as at once constitutive and critical, as the
dynamic materialisation of (un)becoming. Nowhere is this clearer than
in this first special issue of Somatechnics, edited by Joseph Pugliese and
Sevendrini Perera. We welcome responses to the papers contained
in this issue and look forward to publishing work that takes up and
expands the possibilities and challenges posed by Somatechnics.
References
De Lauretis, Teresa (1987), Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Foucault, Michel (1980a), The Confession of the Flesh, in C. Gordon (ed.), Power/
Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 19721977, New York: Pantheon Books,
pp. 194228.
Foucault, Michel (1980b), The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, trans.
Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, Michel (1988), Technologies of the Self, in L. H. Martin, H. Gutman and
P. H. Hutton (eds), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michael Foucault, Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 1649.
Grosz, Elizabeth (1994), Volatile Bodies, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Haraway, Donna (1990), Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature,
New York: Routledge.
Hayles, N. Katherine (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature and Informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Munster, Anna (1999), Is there Postlife after Postfeminism? Tropes of Technics and
Life in Cyberfeminism, Australian Feminist Studies 14: 29, pp. 11929.
Stiegler, Bernard (2008), Technics and Time 2: Disorientation, trans. S. Barker, Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Stiegler, Bernard (2001), Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of
Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith, in T. Cohen (ed.), Jacques Derrida and
the Humanities: A Critical Reader, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 23810.

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