Reading & Prosthetic Intimacy

Maria Fackler, Associate Professor of English right here at Davidson, begins her article, “‘I’ll Google It’: Gossip, Queer Intimacies, and the Internet,” with this confession:

When I read celebrity gossip online, on the sites of my favourite, gay gossip bloggers, I do not imagine that I know anything about the featured celebrities. Instead, my imaginative sympathy is with the gossip blogger himself. When I pass on his posts to my acquaintances, it is as if the blogger is an intimate friend who shared the tid-bit directly with me, over the phone or in person. I have even caught myself saying, “Well, I heard . . .” when I have only read; or even “So-and-so told me . . .” when I have only skimmed a Web page. The rumour I help circulate is of secondary importance to the camaraderie I imagine between myself and the blogger, a stranger with whom, more often than not, I have never directly corresponded. (390)

Dr. Fackler links the imagined camaraderie she enjoys reading on-line gossip blogs to fellow scholar Nick Salvato’s notion of “prosthetic intimacies.” Salvato defines these false-limb familiarities as:

subjective experiences of proximity and affection made possible and legible by confrontations with technics that would seem distinguishable from the subjects confronting them, but that rather contribute indissociably to the performative constitution of those subjects” (qtd by Fackler 393).

What I think Salvato means is that when we watch TV, our television sets operate as prosthetic devices that give us the sense of connection, closeness, and identification with the people we watch. Those people/actors are performing their identities on screen, and when we identify with them, their performances contribute to and blend with our own performances of identity.

While Salvato develops his theory to explain TV viewing habits, Fackler argues that the internet and its related devices also serve as prosthetics:

Laptops and palm pilots, in all their sleek portability, fuse with the body parts for which they were named. I check the blogs and Web sites I frequent on an iPhone cradled in the palm of my hand: the identification with gay gossip bloggers that I describe above is thus a type of prosthetic intimacy. (The identification to which I confess is also a form of prosthetic intimacy that I extend to my reader by gossiping about myself at the beginning of the essay.) While there are principled reasons to be anxious about these attenuated and mediated intimacies and the perils they may entail, we might also consider how these “experiences of proximity and affection” can prove enabling (393-4).

We’ll discuss the concept of “prosthetic intimacies” in class, asking whether it also applies to the original handheld technic: the book. If so, we’ll explore what exactly the prosthetic intimacies of the Hunger Games enable us to do, be, or feel—and whether we should be anxious about these effects.

If you’re interested in learning more about Internet & Community, read the rest of Dr. Fackler’s article in Modern Drama, Vol. 53, No. 3 (Fall 2010), 390-410. It’s available on Project Muse via our library website.