Bionic bodies, posthuman violence and the disembodied criminal subject

This article examines how the so-called disembodied criminal subject is given structure and form through the law of homicide and assault. By analysing how the body is materialised through the criminal law’s enactment of death and injury, this article suggests that the biological positioning of these harms of violence as uncontroversial, natural, and universal conditions of being ‘human’ cannot fully appreciate what makes violence wrongful for us, as embodied entities. Absent a theory of the body, and a consideration of corporeality, the criminal law risks marginalising, or altogether eliding, experiences of violence that do not align with its paradigmatic vision of what bodies can and must do when suffering its effects. Here I consider how the bionic body disrupts the criminal law’s understanding of human violence by being a body that is both organic and inorganic, and capable of experiencing and performing violence in unexpected ways. I propose that a criminal law that is more receptive to the changing, technologically mediated conditions of human existence would be one that takes the corporeal dimensions of violence more seriously and, as an extension of this, adopts an embodied, embedded, and relational understanding of human vulnerability to violence

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RESIDUAL KINETIC VECTORS FOR PROSTHETIC CONTROL

Imagined phantom movements have real physiologic expressions within the residual limb, which we termed residual kinetic activity. In order to exploit the residual functions of transradial amputees we developed a system to register dynamic pressure patterns produced by the residual limb during voluntary commands for motions. This pattern was then converted to a multidimensional vector. Specific requested finger motions were thus detected from the forearm as residual kinetic vectors (RKVs). To decode RKVs, we developed a trainable filter derived from the pseudoinverse of the pressure response matrix. The utility of RKVs was tested on several subjects who expressed both afferent and efferent phantom limb activity. Results showed that amputees using the RKV approach could control at least 3 robotic fingers in near-real time