Donna Haraway complicates the distinction between body and technology from another direction. In A Cyborg Manifesto, she observes that contemporary technologies have made “thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body…”

The cyborg is useful here not simply as an image of a human combined with a machine, but as a challenge to the assumption that “human” and “technology” begin as two stable and autonomous categories and subsequently enter into relation. Bodies are already constituted through material, technological, social and political conditions.

This also prevents embodiment from becoming an innocent account of the body simply extending itself through useful objects. If I learn to act through a tool, I am also learning the possibilities and restrictions that have been designed into it. Someone has determined what the system can sense, which actions it permits, which bodies it anticipates, and which possibilities remain unavailable.

With the lettering guide, these conditions are physically apparent: its edge literally stops my hand. With computational technologies, comparable constraints may be less visible. A sensor has a detection range. Software establishes categories and thresholds. An interface makes some actions intuitive and others difficult or impossible. These conditions can become incorporated into bodily behaviour even when they are no longer consciously perceived as constraints.

Donna Haraway’s cyborg gives this technological relation another dimension. In A Cyborg Manifesto, she argues that contemporary technologies make boundaries between natural and artificial, organism and machine increasingly difficult to maintain. The importance of the cyborg here is not that humans are simply merging with machines. It is that neither the body nor technology should be treated as innocent, self-contained entities that only meet after they have already been formed.

This also makes embodiment political.

If I learn to act through a tool, I am also learning the possibilities and restrictions that have been designed into it. With the lettering guide, these constraints are easy to see: there is an edge, and my pen cannot pass through it. Computational constraints are often less visible. A sensor has a range. Software requires categories. A threshold decides when something counts. An interface makes some actions obvious and leaves others unavailable.