Thacker then makes the claim that tissue engineering is an example of the disappearance of technology into the human:

"Technology in tissue engineering seems to disappear - (into the body, my emphasis) - because no prosthetics, mechanical parts, foreign DNA, or even surgical interventions are required. With the lack of a readily identifiable technological apparatus, it appears that the body produced in tissue engineering is a fully natural body-something akin to a biotech supplement. Technology is thus invisible yet immanent"......(Thacker 2006)

When technology becomes so transparent as to be indistinguishable from the body it is because it has been discursively incorporated into the flesh. That is technology becomes part of a feedback loop that sustains the physical being.

"The more the discourse of the natural body is asserted within tissue engineering and medicine , the more this vision of a regenerative body is instituted as a normative constraint defining the normal healthy biomedical body. The version of the biomedical body is simultaneously natural and unable to do without technology separate from it. The result is that the body is objectified but in a particularly unique way such that the body can be seen , in the right conditions, as a self-regenerating, self-curling black box." (Thacker 2006)

Now startlingly he indicates that -albeit the methodological differences- the goals announced by Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine of overcoming our mortal destiny may actually be facilitated by the process of tissue engineering:

Here is Sri Aurobindo:

"today we see humanity satiated but not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its primeval longings. The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last -God, Light, Freedom, Immortality. (Aurobindo 1972)

Now here is Thacker describing one of the more extreme outcomes that may result from tissue engineering technology:

“Tissue engineering deeply invests the materiality of the body with a force that attempts to break out of the constraints of materiality and corporeality. For example , if we return to the opening description of the standard techniques in tissue engineering , we can see a set of practices that harbor within themselves some implication about the body surpassing itself. In the first step, the very idea of cell sourcing looks forward to the capacity to replicate an unlimited supply of raw materials for tissue an organ regeneration (especially when stem cells become the cell source. In the second step , the integration of cells and materials (cells seeded in biopolymer scaffold) evokes a process of spontaneous order in which, given the right combination of materials, the body simply self-assembles with minimal intervention. And in the third step the cultivation of the apparatus and its surgical implementation reinforce the modular , highly objectified approach to the body seen in anatomical and medical science. From this perspective , tissue engineering can be regarded as an instance in which the body gradually arises out of what Arthur Kroker calls a “torture chamber” of “mortality” and rapidly heads toward what can be viewed as a body without death. “ (Thacker 2006)   more »