Document Type
Review
Abstract
[First paragraph]
The first thing that David Willis does in Dorsality is win, perhaps for good, the race backwards to decide when we first became posthuman, which is in effect to become technological. If Bernard Stiegler ably undoes Katherine Hayles’ mid-20th century definition of the posthuman by associating it with humans’ exteriorization in general, even such “basic” exteriorizations as the use of tools, then Willis does him one better by describing the very essence of movement, of corticality, as inherently technological and posthuman. What is to be gained by this move? Firstly, it grants Willis the opportunity to describe the experience of “the technological” as myriad relations to the rear involving the loss of “human” control that has been associated with a generalized automatism. Secondly, the move allows Willis to turn through an impressive array of writers and philosophers in order to explore the affect of being technological, an affect which Willis continually, straining the limits of synonyms, insists is dorsal in nature.
Repository Citation
Clinton, Alan. "Review of Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics, by David Willis." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 9, no. 2, 2009, pp. 1–3. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol9/iss2/18