Abstract
This chapter presents the thesis that claims that technologies and practices of human enhancement are transformed into an unprecedented biopolitical power over the living, whose objective not only focuses on regulating population processes from a distance but also on the intervention of its own molecular texture. The advance of these unleashes an unprecedented power until they become instruments of power over the living. In order to bring this to fruition, in the first place, we inquire whether the desire to enhance the human being is a new task or if, on the contrary, it is something that has always been accompanying humanity. Secondly, it addresses the specificities that characterize contemporary technology, in general, and the technologies and practices of human enhancement, in particular. This relates to a way to unconceal reality, articulated with a biopolitical power of atomization, molecularization, and fragmentation of living matter. Finally, and thirdly, the characteristic notes of this biopolitics of vitality are revealed, which are evident in artificial human enhancement.
This chapter has been written as part of the project “The Device of Human enhancement: a biopolitical perspective in the era of biotechnological colonization of the body,” directed by Professor Daniel Toscano López and funded in the 2019 Initiation FONDECYT call for projects. Fondecyt Initiation N°11190340.
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Notes
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- 2.
With this term, in 2013, Peter Haff designated a new sphere of the Earth as a globally interrelated autonomous system in which fossil energy plays an important role in turning the Technosphere into a huge CO2 factory. Within this context, human intention stands as a geological force with a strong influence on the development of the Earth’s history (cf. Haff, 2014).
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The practices of human enhancement can pursue different non-therapeutic goals, for instance: the pursuit of happiness (modifying moods, emotions, cognition through drugs, or manipulating memory to extract saddening episodes out of it); the pursuit of perfection (altering the brain through cognitive enhancement neuropharmaceuticals or manipulating genetics in an attempt to create physically and mentally gifted individuals) (cf. Blackford, 2004); the pursuit of life extension (for example, ageless bodies through the use of tissue engineering, nanotechnology, or other techniques that try to slow down the aging of tissues (cf. Kass, 2003).
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The difference between Galton’s classical eugenics -established in 1883 in his work “Human Faculty and its Development,” whose theoretical-scientific interest was to emulate the mechanism of natural selection to find out whether inheritance was manipulable or not (cf. Mukherjee, 2016) and the current human enhancement is Galton’s emphasis on human phenotype or physical features, while artificial enhancement is committed to gene manipulation. Although the Nazis were also interested in genetic manipulation, they did so as a weapon of war to exterminate their enemy; while current enhancement sees genetic engineering technologies as one of several ways to benefit the human species, disregarding race.
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Nancy Campbell refers to “suspect technologies” as “technologies of which there is reasonable suspicion that their development, deployment, and effects are unevenly distributed, differential, and more likely to be socially unjust than not” (Campbell, 2005, p. 375).
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The translation is mine.
- 8.
One of the most representative discourses of this deliberate improvement of the human being by technological means is the scientific ideology of transhumanism. Transhumanism is not a creed nor is it a completely homogeneous movement, but it sees in convergent technologies (Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno) the possibility that scientific research finally brings to fruition the dreams of an immortality-yearning, computer-minded human reason, as well as “explorations and colonization of distant parts of the universe, or unusual mental and sensory experiences, completely alien to our species, like those that the protagonist of the movie Avatar lives virtually” (Diéguez, 2017, p. 20).
- 9.
For a detailed study of human enhancement both at a general and specific level, see: Savulescu and Bostrom (2009). Human Enhancement. Oxford University Press, New York.
- 10.
An interesting position that affirms that machines are a projection and an imitation of the organic is Kapp’s, for whom making utensils is an essential requirement for reflective thinking and self-consciousness to emerge in the human being. Hence, artifacts are tools for understanding and adaptation. See: Kapp (2018). Elements of a Philosophy of Technology: On the Evolutionary History of Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Toscano López, D.G. (2023). Unconcealing Contemporary Technology: Human Enhancement as Biopolitics of Vitality. In: Fritzsche, A., Santa-María, A. (eds) Rethinking Technology and Engineering. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 45. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25233-4_19
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