At the frontier of research in neuroprosthetic limb technology, experimenters are developing systems for sensory feedback (prosthetic touch). Drawing upon two years of ethnographic fieldwork chronicling neuroprosthetic clinical trials, I interpret neurostimulation experiments as a reverse-engineering: in which efforts to engineer sensory feedback recursively inform basic scientific understanding about touch itself. In this article, I analyse reverse-engineering as technoscientific practice, phenomenological experience, and mode of knowledge-making, in which gaps between natural and artificial (or ‘electric’) touch get sustained and undone. In tracing the ways touch becomes constructed, abstracted, and experienced – including through phantom sensations and syn-aesthetic description – I examine how multiple coinciding versions of touch get produced at the level of the nervous system. I analyse the consequences of this multiplicity on theorizations of human and nonhuman touch, haptic experience, and touching subjects, sustaining epistemological and ontological openness amid efforts to pinpoint touch as a site of knowledge-making.

中文翻译：

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逆向工程触摸：通过假体神经刺激进行意义构建和理解

在神经假肢技术研究的前沿，实验人员正在开发感觉反馈（假肢触觉）系统。根据两年来记录神经假体临床试验的人种学实地考察，我将神经刺激实验解释为逆向工程：在其中，对感觉反馈进行递归设计的努力为人们提供了关于触摸本身的基本科学理解。在本文中，我将逆向工程分析为技术科学实践、现象学经验和知识制造模式，其中自然和人工（或“电”）触摸之间的差距得到持续和消除。在追踪触觉的构建、抽象和体验方式（包括通过幻觉和联觉描述）时，我研究了神经系统层面上如何产生多个同时发生的触觉版本。我分析了这种多样性对人类和非人类触摸、触觉体验和触摸主题的理论化的影响，在努力将触摸确定为知识创造场所的同时保持认识论和本体论的开放性。