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Notes Hogle, L (2005) Enhancement technologies and the body

Annual Review of Anthropology, no. 34. Pp. 695-716 Abstract: The technological ability to alter biology, along with the social conditions and cultural expectations that enable such transformation, is spawning a variety of techniques that augment bodily forms and functions. These techniques, collectively known as enhancement technologies, aim to improve human characteristics, including appearance and mental or physical functioning, often beyond what is normal or necessary for life and well-being. Humans have always modified their bodies. What distinguishes these techniques is that bodies and selves become objects of improvement work, unlike previous efforts to achieve progress through social and political institutions. There are profound effects on sociality and subjectivity. This chapter reviews analytical approaches through which researchers have attempted to illuminate these practices, moral and economic reasoning, cultural assumptions and institutional contexts constituting enhancements, framing the discussion by examining the concept of the normal body. Examples from cosmetic, neurological and genetic enhancements will illustrate. Notes: Hockenberry (2001): bodies as they now exist are an arbitrary, evolutionary solution to issues of mobility, communication, and functioning in the environment 696 Enhancements exist in a nexus of complex social, political, and historical relations, media representations, and medical and legal definitions of disorder and well-being Defining enhancement o An intervention intended to improve the function or characteristic of the body beyond what is considered as necessary for general well-being Restoration vs. enhancement E.g. anti-aging What is necessary to sustain health? Medicine vs. enhancement o Medicine: isolation of a pathology, restoration to the natural state o Enhancement: invention, redesign and upgrading capabilities Normality o Relatively new notion, adopted in mid-19th century under the influence of rising statistics The concept of normal curve Perception of normality may be quite subjective, normal curve gives it a form Collecting various data, establishing normal levels Information to manage populations health and labour o Davis: Normalcy use of statistics to delineate individuals position within an array of normal curves based on various characteristics, isolation of the outliers, targeting for intervention Physical conditions can be given political significance because the nonstandards may be perceived as costly to a society both economically and

simon.fiala@seznam.cz politically. It then becomes conceivable to attempt to "norm" the nonstandard or "defectives" using social-scientific programs 698 eugenics o probability statistics and risk assessment Rose Ideal vs. normal, average vs. normal 699 o Idea of normality has a moral quality, the norm becomes the way it ought to be o Norm comes to stand for something to strive for, rather than a centred, neutral, or positive condition, the average comes to be seen as the deficient. 699 Bioethics providing treatments that may not be medically necessary? o Drew attention to defining the proper goals of medicine, distinguishing from social goals and values o E.g. the human growth hormone in some cases a treatment of retarded, in other cases an enhancement high stature improves individuals chance to life success o Competitiveness vs. equality of chances o "Unequal outcomes that parallel existing inequalities in status, power, or wealth can (...) result." 700 o The keeping up atmosphere enhancements not necessarily contribute to social well-being of a society o Sport enhancements seriously undermine the competitive sporting culture Health-risks? Just one facet of the story The sporting body Nutrition and training is enhancement just as anabolic and growth hormones how to draw the distinction? One-off enhancements the issue of being genuine Permanent enhancements undermining the equality of chances, perpetuating existing social inequalities guidelines to simplify medical decision making: Treat only when medically necessary, treat when there is a need to eliminate something that puts a person at a disadvantage, or treat whenever someone has a desire to eliminate a characteristic o dependent on distinction between normal-abnormal and treatment-enhancement Anthropological point of view o Enhancements in the affluent West / developing countries o Ideals of bodies culturally specific, intertwined with values and social institutions o Bio-power the relations of modern forms of power, which operate through bodily disciplines and modifications With knowledge (of individuals' lives and bodies), administrative techniques could be employed to plan health services and regulate social life 701 Intertwined concepts of health, illness and deviance Control of population through inciting desires fostering of well-being while making citizens subject to regulatory control Internalization of the norm technologies of the self, self-monitoring, selfmastery

simon.fiala@seznam.cz Martin: Unreliability of work cultures, polarization of wealth, connections Embodied assets e.g. body modification

o Body projects Expansion of leisure time, consumer culture Body maintenance requires consumption of goods o Question of authenticity Does the self stem from some essence of naturalness, or is it an inventing one by altering biology? What is taken to be granted in the nature vs. what is perceived as a result of the human effort Enhancement technology assists nature? o Cyborg anthropology (Donna Haraway) Science, technology and medicine connected to social study of science, technology and society, and sociology of knowledge Boundary crossing between technologies and bodies A cyborg a technological artefact and a cultural icon Posthuman subjectivity seamless connection of bodies, information technologies and technologies used as prosthetics Refuses essentialist discourses One can choose his embodiment o Enhanced bodies may be not a pursuit of immortality and perfection, but rather a way of controlling and designing the body and therefore lives (Giddens engaging with the wider political issues through controlling ones body) Cosmetic procedures o Appearance has cultural importance in terms of identity and notions of beauty, but it has also been used to socially and medically evaluate health, fitness (competency, productivity), morality Eugenics Normalization For disfigured, passing as able bodied is important for physical and social functioning 706 The greatest thing that disabled have done for the society is that they made it safe to look weird (Hockenberry 2001) o Resisting normalization Enabling deaf to hear? Also perceived as discrimination. Cosmetic surgery then becomes a technology through which the body is normalized and homogenized as much as enhanced. 704 o Cosmetic body enhancements rely on cultural explanations and attempts to achieve social outcomes using medical interventions 707 o Plastic surgery as a post-war preoccupation o Removal of ethnical features in immigrants o Homogenization of cultural notions of beauty through the globalized media o Must be situated in discourses of gender 3

simon.fiala@seznam.cz o Surgery as a form of oppression / empowerment Who gets access to which level of enhancements (ignored by Stelarc) Cognitive enhancements o Rely on a biological reductionist assumption that all behaviour, interactions, and physiological functions are related to neuronal structures. 707 o Synthetic memory Enhancement / reversal of a damage o Seeking authenticity Drugs as a key to self-fulfilment 708 o Brain the locus of selfhood in the Western culture Incentive to look for the source of the problem and assume responsibility for solution through medication Genetic enhancement o Biology-as-information made malleable o There are numerous ethical and social concerns about genetic alterations. Defining and regulating ethically permissible interventions have proven to be difficult 710 o Scully & Rehman-Sutter: positioning the interface between permissible and nonpermissible interventions at the same place as the boundaries between therapy and enhancement, and between normal and abnormal embodiment uses biology to justify moral evaluation, privileges the single standpoint of the genetically canonical person and enhances the dichotomy between 'normal' and 'not normal'. 710 o Defending the human essence vs. enhancing the humanity o Behavioural enhancements: intelligence and behaviours targeted for intervention o Selective embryo implantation Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis o Supply theoretically available, it is the ethical concerns that restrict its development Human becomes commodity Also responsibility to create something better that human Narratives of sufficiency and expectations