“I/Magnet” Association: How Do People with Magnet Implants Signify Their New Experience

Based on self-reports of people with magnet implants, I investigate a pair of correlational questions: “How do technologically modified humans signify their new experience?” and “How do we, non-modified readers, become able to conceive it?”. In answering the first question I start with biosemiotics. It considers signs being embedded in the morphology of an organism. On the one side, a magnet becomes a part of a human morphology and bodily schema; on the other — unlike most living organisms, humans can vary signs arbitrarily. I switch the theoretical exposition of the relation between signs, the human body, and technology to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, based on whose work Ihde conducted a phenomenological analysis of 4 regimes of technological mediations within the “I — World” correlation. His scheme was extended by Verbeek, who adds “cyborg relation” to the list. In the second part of the paper, I apply a vocabulary of material semiotics to the analysis of the “I/magnet” association. I separate quotes of MI-agents into several stages of existence of the association in question: emergence; interactions with constant magnets; interactions with electromagnetic devices; learning through others; actual non-expected associations; sense-formation; new risks of disruption of associations; normalization. I conclude with an attempt to answer 2nd initial question, about our (readers) conceivability by appealing to Barsalou’s “perceptual symbol systems” approach, with the help of which I correlate synesthesia of MI-agents and semiosis — which transforms the field of meaning for a non-modified person.

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