Standpoint primer: I am a millennial professor at a neuroscience center of excellence conducting medical research with and for people who are paralyzed, mostly from spinal cord injury. ^I am not pictured here, this 35mm slide is from before our time. But this picture comes from my institute's lineage and shows wonderfully the weird relationality inherent to the craft and wtf neuroscience is an aesthetic. Welcome to my world.
What role will paralysis play in our post-anthropic future? The material/energy footprint that enables the beyond-human lives of those I work with is simply staggering, a seemingly eco-impossible throughput obligate, not an aberration of conspicuous consumption but an extension of physiology into sterilized single-use plastics and exogenous biochemistry. Yet amidst this cyborgization they embody some of the most atechnic messages of our time: slow the fuck down, appreciate kinesthesia, embrace others. Their paralysis teaches sobriété admits the agitation of our time. How is it that (from my perspective) the literally disembodied of us are seemingly more in-bodied than the rest of us? These monsters are simultaneously enabled and resisted by modernity, and yet their very existence is an act of becoming more than human, if not simply by doing less. What of the lessons and lives of these monsters allow us to all become more/less than human?
