Plugging Into the Electric Body: Rethinking Bio-Data as Worldly Sensibility

• In Event: 28.090 - MTCC Roundtable Session Nine
  In Roundtable Session: 28.090-1 - Biosocial Futures: The Policy Implications of the Life Sciences in Education

Abstract

Objectives: This paper examines biosensors commonly used to measure the body for physiological biodata. I analyze electro-dermal activity (EDA) recorded using skin sensors, which is said to be linked to the sympathetic nervous system. Due to inexpensive and widely available technology, these kind of data are used to determine affect and engagement in learning experiments, although it has a long checkered history in psychological and physiological research. I critique the standard use of these data to induce self-regulation in children, and show how bio-sensors can be read instead as evidence of a post-phenomenological worldly sensibility. I offer evidence in support of two claims: (1) EDA data is not simply the recording and storing of human bodily experience, but is a direct encounter with an electric worldly `sensibility’ shared across an environment. (2) The bioethics of such research is not so much the technical accessing of biodata but the fact that such data are stolen to serve the control state.

Techniques and Perspective(s): Digital bio-sensory technology detects activity below the perceptual threshold of the human, and thus demands a theoretical framework that pursues an expansive approach to worldly sensibility. These devices track the provisional ground of embodiment, but also the distributed and differential nature of a particular environment. Drawing on studies in critical and digital life studies, this approach considers technologies as participating in the environment firstly (Gane, 2005; Rose, 2013; Ruppert, Law & Savage, 2013). Following Hansen (2015), I suggest that the biosocial movement might move “from perception-centred accounts of experience to a broader understanding of sensibility as the concrete texture of experience across the board” (p. 48). I use the EDA data to pursue this theory, drawing also on the feminist philosopher of science Elizabeth Wilson (2015) who shows how the peripheral nervous system actually dominates the central nervous system in the transmission and distribution of crucial biochemical compounds, such as adrenaline and serotonin, pointing to the pivotal role of the “biological periphery” in human learning.

Data sources: I discuss current research using EDA data in Affective Computing, and compare this to data from three small pilot projects, where the experimental design significantly changed the findings, underscoring the environmentality of experience.

Results and Significance: My focus on skin conductance is a way of attending to the neurological periphery – the far flung electrical activity of the ecological body – rather than what is assumed to be the center and administrator of that system, the brain. I show how researchers might reclaim and re-use these digital plug-ins in ways that subvert the interests of normative neuroscience, thereby contesting the interests of control and self-regulation that make learning a process of correction. I hope this work contributes to the ongoing process of formulating a robust bioethics adequate to our new empiricisms, by reclaiming biodata that is used to pathologize the individual human body in a first step to address the political concerns associated with the “biosocial subject” (Colebrook, 2014; Gillborn, 2013; Protevi, 2013). 

Author

• Elizabeth De Freitas, Manchester Metropolitan University