Abstract

This article mobilises the deceptive bodily immediacy of shame and scruple as an interface to David Wills’ call for ‘an ethics that takes account of the machine in the human’. It aligns the play of cover and exposure that is part of the experience of embarrassment and shame with an ‘aesthetic’ and ‘anaesthetic’ register of technology and provides a conceptualisation of the way this becomes manifest in daily life. Rather than providing a detailed account of Wills’ work, it thus engages in a selective and partial reading to develop perspectives on the speed of technological change, which is making the stakes of an ‘ethics’ that can acknowledge the technicity of feeling all the more apparent.